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The Girl of To-morrow-What the School Will Do 

For Her^ 

BY 
BENJAMIN R. ANDREWS, Ph.D. 

The girl of yesterday we grown folks all know. We went to 
school with her, we played games with her, we went off to college 
with her — the same college if our lot was cast in a co-educational 
democracy. 

The education of the girl of yesterday — we all know that too ! 
It was the education of the boy of yesterday. It lay first of all in 
the public school or, in favored communities, in the kindergarten 
where "gifts" were expected to create in the child mind a certain 
worldview dreamed by a German philosopher, but where in reality 
social activities and games first brought little barbarians to the 
yoke. And through this kindergarten porch the girl of yesterday 
went into a graded place called a school — a sort of temple of 
knowledge with many great terraces, on each of which she lin- 
gered a year; and there she mastered numerals and letters and 
numbers and words, and learned how these odd dead things made 
books, readers and spellers, and more spellers and readers, and 
geographies and histories and grammars. Yet all this was for 
her only a confusion of memorized symbols and words, a veritable 
desert relieved by occasional vivid teaching. Outside the school 
it was that the girl of yesterday had her real education — on the 
playground, in the yard and garden at home, in the house with the 
family group — wherever, in fact, real interests and activities took 
hold on life itself and shaped mind and purpose. 

From the graded school, the girl of yesterday went on to the 
classical high school. How wistfully and fearfully she had look- 
ed across the green to the x\cademy ! And when the Irish janitor 
— rest to his soul — brought across one day the Academy skeleton 
"that the eighth grade children might see how they were made," 
the girl of yesterday had wondered whether she must learn the 
208 bones — or was it 206? — when she too reached the high 



IThls article, awarded first prize In the World's Work Educational Con- 
test, (World's Work, June, 1911. Vol. XXII, pp. 14526-30), Is here republished 
by special permission of Doubleday. Page & Co. Reprinted in "The School 
of To-morrow". Garden City. N. Y., 1911 pp. 59-75. Copyrighted 1911, by 
Doubleday, Page & Co. 



2 TECHNICAL, EDUCATIONAL BULLETIN. 

school yonder. In due time she came there, and found it all, alas, 
a place of bones, not only in physiology, but bones in history — 
"name the presidents in order," or "who were the nine muses?" 
and bones in Latin — "do, dare, dedi, datum" ; and often only 
bones in literature — "give names and dates of Scott's novels." 
Lucky that life went on in social groups, in school and out, and in 
the home ! 

Occasionally, the high school girl of yesterday wondered 
what she would do when school days were over, and of all profes- 
sions teaching alone seemed open to her. All the world is a sea 
to the sailor, and to girls just finishing the old-time school, teach- 
ing seemed the only profession. 

The old high school course — with its algebra never applied 
in life, its analytical study of literature, its stilted compositions, 
its endless translations and paradigms — employed the mind in 
innocent exercises. That this had somewhat of useful discipline, 
we will not deny, but it gave no practical training for life. As the 
student grew to maturity, her knowledge of the world as it is, 
came through outside experiences, and widened — if it did widen 
— more despite the high school than by virtue of it. 

Of the girls of yesterday who started in the elementary 
school, one in ten received a high school education, and less than 
one in a hundred of those who finished high school went on into 
college. To those who went to college, education was offering 
at best only a continuation of the literary curriculum of the high 
school. Brave women in the last generation had demanded wo- 
men's departments in universities, but what courses they gained 
were largely serving to perpetuate literary culture and to prepare 
for teaching. Men's colleges for a generation have been differ- 
entiating into groups of scientific and professional schools — engi- 
neering with its varied phases, law, medicine, agriculture, com- 
merce, journalism and what not, each offering a diversified pre- 
paration for a distinct vocation. All this time the woman's col- 
lege has stood by its general literary and scientific courses and 
against vocational specialization, until finally some one remarks 
in passing that "in women's colleges alone is the education of the 
gentleman held in its proper esteem." 

The college girl of yesterday, the one in a hundred who 
could go on to college, found herself in a blind alley — literary 



THE GIRL OF TO-MORROW 



culture with its two outlooks, the life of the idle gentlewoman, or 
the life of the teacher, and then more literary culture. The wo- 
man of to-day — the girl of yesterday — if she is broad-minded and 
generous and serviceable, owes her high qualities to the formative 
social inrtuences which have shaped her life, rather than to her 
formal education. 

But the girl of to-morrow — what of her education? You will 
not find it embodied today in any one school, but here and there 
you can get partial glimpses of the world to be. Come into a 
certain elementary school in Manhattan where the aim is prepar- 
ation for serviceable, happy living, not for pedantry. Note the 
equipment: a large gymnasium with apparatus suited to fixed 
exercises, with plenty of baths, with ample space for folk dances, 
pageants, drama — in short, with opportunity for all kinds of ac- 
tivity except swimming ; there is a library and reading room where 
little children work during school hours, learning that books are 
tools to be used by all people in every practical undertaking. Each 
class room is equipped, not with fixed desks for parrot recitations 
to a parrot teacher, but with ordinary work tables and chairs 
suitable for working operations, for conversation, discussion and 
cooperation ; and there are special rooms besides — a cooking room 
and dining room where little girls learn the wonders of bread 
doughs and soups, a shop room where the rougher, heavier con- 
structive work is carried on, a sewing room for clothing projects, 
a club room giving place for social activities, a garden space on 
the roof in lieu of nature's space on the ground. Such is the 
building, and within it one finds life, not barren schooling. Can I 
say better than that each subject is lived through, not learned — 
that one acquires letters to read a loved story, and numbers to 
count and control some matter already of real concern; that one 
studies history to understand the puzzle of the Stars and Stripes 
and the devotion of the veterans on Memorial day ; and geography 
to know why there is a valley here where the school house stands, 
and to know where these ships are bound that pass on the river. 

The way of real education is the setting of the child's mind 
to solve the problems that life fixes; and this way my ideal ele- 
mentary school has found. Not only in method but in content 
of study does it reach out into life's realities. The weakness of 
the old school was that it worked in a vacuum ; the strength of 



4 TECHNICAL. EDUCATIONAIi BTJLUSTIN. 

the new school is that its subject matter of instruction is not only 
literary material and scientific results (as in history and geog- 
raphy), but that all this and everything in its curriculum is taught 
as an interpretation of the work-a-day dynamic world in which we 
live. The new school will give to pupils at fourteen years of age 
intelligence regarding the various fields of work — professional 
practice, trade, commerce, or housekeeping — which are opening up 
before them and will thus aid in that most fundamental decision — 
the choice of a vocation. Industrial and vocational intelligence 
(not specific vocational training however) describes this new aim 
of the elementary school. Through this period, the training of 
both sexes will stand substantially alike, liberalizing, cultural, 
problem-solving, informational as regards the world just ahead. 

What now of the higher schools, where the girl of to-morrow 
fits herself for the woman's work of the day after? Come into 
a certain great new technical high school in an Ohio metropolis. 
It has for its principal the graduate of an engineering college, and 
it offers courses especially for boys and courses especially for 
girls. Here the girl who must soon make a livelihood may pre- 
pare to be a designer in special fields, an illustrator, a house man- 
ager, a private secretary, a dressmaker, a milliner, an infant's 
nurse, or perhaps a skilled cook — and she is trained in such a way 
that she keeps a more liberal outlook on life than the specialized 
worker of to-day dreams of. Or go to Chicago with its promising 
two-year vocational high school for those who can tarry but two 
years after grammar school before going to work. Take notice 
of its system of cooperation between school and shop and factory, 
which successfully combines instruction and practice. And this 
is but an indication of a mighty revolution in education — the girl 
shall be taught a definite vocation (outside of home work) as 
well as the boy. The school shall prepare young people for prac- 
tical life. The elementary school, although it will not teach vo- 
cations, shall fit children to make an intelligent choice. The high 
school shall give them the training they need for their elected 
careers ; it shall offer courses of varied length and purpose — two 
years for those who stay only so long, four years for those who 
remain longer. With vocational training shall go some liberal 
culture, so that, ultimately, every man shall have a vocation and 
a free choice of avocations at his command. 



THE GIRL OF TO-MORROW 



The girl of to-morrow who can postpone her vocational choice 
shall find an opportunity in the high school to continue her lib- 
eral education ; but for her benefit there shall be highly special- 
ized schools which, when she has finished her preliminary training, 
will give her scientific preparation for useful work. A number 
of such schools are already in existence. 

Go to the splendid institutes in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Roch- 
ester, and Chicago, established by far-seeing men of wealth to 
train high school graduates for practical service, and canvass the 
training offered there to the girl of to-morrow. Preparation for 
household management, woman's traditional field, is provided as 
a matter of course — but note with what new implications and ap- 
plications. First, we find hundreds of teachers of domestic 
science who may increase the efficiency of private housekeeping 
through that socializing instrument, the public school, to the end 
that housework may pass over into a science, as the poor decrepit 
farming of the last generation has become the agriculture of to- 
day. What of the household when methods of dry farming, irri- 
gation, Burbanking, modem chemistry, bacteriology, and me- 
chanics shall be turned loose within doors as well as out on the 
land? But new opportunities in household arts are also opening 
in every direction. In the Rochester institution there is a course 
of training in lunch-room management, in which the young wo- 
men are instructed in related science, but especially in the practise 
of their profession by daily responsibility in conducting a lunch 
room for 200 students. The graduates have been quickly ab- 
sorbed in Rochester by wise managers of banks, department 
stores, and factories; one, salaried at $1,200, directs her French 
chefs and feeds the 300 employees of a department store; another 
manages a lunch room in a huge clothing factory, and, since her 
advent, saloons across the street have gone out of business. A 
similarly trained young woman took hold of a lunch room in St. 
Louis last fall, improved the service, and turned a deficit into a 
$290 surplus the first month. Schools, banks, mercantile and 
commercial houses need the trained lunch-room manager and are 
discovering their need and how to fill it. It is only a step from 
this to the commercial lunch room. The best lunch rooms in 
Boston, and they are among the largest too, are today conducted 
by a trained woman, and they are cleaner than your own kitchen. 



6 TECHNICAL, EDUCATIONAL BULLETIN. 

Even the despised delicatessen shop and the commercial bakery 
may yet come into the hands of the trained woman, who will give 
us there, on a grand social scale, the safeguards to health which 
in the past she provided for the private home. Again, these in- 
stitutes are fitting women to conduct dressmaking shops and 
millinery shops as skilled business enterprises. Who knows but 
that escape from the robber-barons of fashion will come through 
the more intelligent professional standards of those who clothe us ? 
All kinds of artistic achievement, in design, in illustration, and 
creative work in all the special fields for which deft fingers and the 
sensitive eye are essential, as well as enterprise along commercial 
and industrial lines, are other ventures which these practical in- 
stitutes are providing for the young woman of tomorrow. 

What the young man of to-morrow does, the young woman 
of to-morrow may also freely do if she will — and so we shall then 
find her occasionally, as we find her now, in the advanced pro- 
fessional fields of engineering, law, medicine, and the ministry. 
It is well so, for absolute freedom of action is the only possible 
basis for a wise choice of vocations. The young women who go 
into higher professional training will, however, fit themselves, as 
a general thing, for the fields of service that belong distinctively 
to women. 

But what about a professional, specialized education for wo- 
men, on a university level — an education that corresponds to the 
training young men receive at schools of technology? For ans- 
wer, go to a certain pent-up Manhattan street and enter the 
business-like looking structure that stands there. In this building 
seven hundred young women are hard at work studying the 
household arts. Make inquiries about them. One is the director 
of a college dormitory, come for special instruction in dietetics, 
that the 300 girls in her charge may enjoy nutritious food while 
her expenditures still keep within her budget allowance. Another 
wishes to be a visiting dietitian, instructing in tenement homes as 
to the best food for the infant, the working man, and the aged. 
There is a group of graduate nurses, already skilled in their pro- 
fession, fitting themselves for the administration of hospitals, or 
for teaching positions in nurses' training schools. There is a 
nurse who is matriculated in "laundry management" and will be- 
come the director of a hospital laundry. Here are young women 



THE GIRL OF TO-MORROW 7 

preparing in house decoration or interior decoration, others as 
costume designers and illustrators or as designers in special in- 
dustrial fields of unending variety. Others of these young women 
of to-morrow have entered for diplomas in household administra- 
tion and in dietetics; preparing, some for general institutional 
■management, and others for the direction of the commissary 
department of institutions, such as the school and college dormi- 
tor}% the asylum, the hospital, and the orphanage — undertakings 
that involve money, materials, and labor in factory-like quantities 
and for which compensation will be given according to the re- 
sponsibility involved. There are curricula which prepare for the 
less ambitious but no less important management of the private 
home ; and for a new field of special study, that of nursery man- 
agement, which promises aid in the infant mortality campaign. 
Other courses prepare for sanitary inspection of markets, tene- 
ments, and food supplies, and for various kinds of service in the 
municipal housekeeping which now guards the private home. 
Graduates of these institutes will teach to all people the new 
science of right living, and will make it the law of the land. 

Here, then, is a technical school of collegiate rank for women, 
devoted to the development upon a social scale of those household 
activities which have long been women's particular domain, and 
to the professional training of women not only in the conduct of 
the private house but also of the institution and of related indus- 
trial undertakings. What is being done in this building in Man- 
hattan is also under way in other university centres, at Boston, 
Toronto, Chicago, and elsewhere. In these collegiate schools of 
household science and arts, which promise to be a feature of 
American universities as common as schools of engineering, the 
young woman of to-morrow will find one of her most fascinating 
fields of possible study. 

And personal life and the private home will not suflFer in the 
education of the girl of to-morrow. Some things seem fairly cer- 
tain. Every young woman (social parasites disregarded) will be 
taught some useful livelihood which she will pursue at least until 
marriage, in some cases after, and which will be insurance if, after 
marriage, she is again thrown upon her own resources ; every 
young woman will learn the elements of household management 
in her public school education, so that she may intelligently direct 



LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 



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8 TECHNICAL. EDUCATIONAL. BULJL.BTIN. 

a home, if it comes to her. The industries of the household will 
be increasingly organized outside the home, and she will bring to 
their direction her time-proved standards of devotion, rendered 
more effective by scientific training and professional preparation. 
With readjustment will come opportunity for life as well as living, 
and regard for liberal culture will accompany industrial efifi- 
ciency ; this element will be fostered in woman's education as well 
as in man's and to the girl of the future will be given an education 
not only for efficient service but for vigorous health and for lib- 
eral living. 



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